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The Kate Adie Collection

Kate Adie OBE grew up in Sunderland and later became Chief News Correspondent at the BBC.

“The city has a wonderful history and growing up in cities like Sunderland does shape you, it makes you the person you are. Sunderland shaped me. It is all to do with where I come from, and I feel very strongly about that.” Kate Adie 2024

Kate’s Collection relates to her professional life, documenting a trailblazing broadcast journalism career covering major world events and reporting from war and combat zones including the Gulf and Yugoslavia.  Kate’s reasons for depositing her archive with the University of Sunderland are to preserve a record of her professional career and to promote scholarship and research within humanities and social sciences.

The Collection is a unique archive of  documents, reporter’s notebooks, photographs, BBC newsclips and artifacts relating to Kate’s career and placed on indefinite loan with the University Library. Kate continues to add material to the Collection.

Kate’s published works include:  Kindness of Strangers, Corsets to Camouflage, Into Danger and Nobody's Child. Kate maintains connections with Sunderland, referencing the city throughout her books. Kate holds honorary degrees from a number of Universities and is Honorary Professor of Journalism at the University of Sunderland. She was awarded an OBE in 1993 and won the Richard Dimbleby Award from BAFTA in 1990.

The University has recently been awarded grant funding from Archives Revealed to continue cataloguing the collection. This is an exciting opportunity to open the collection for wider and more inclusive engagement and interest, within a University of Sunderland academic context and also locally and nationally.